In W. G. Sebald’s final work, Austerlitz, the narrator Jacques Austerlitz recalls an inspirational history teacher from his school days, a man called André Hilary. Hilary’s pièce de résistance is an extraordinarily detailed recreation of the Battle of Austerlitz in Moravia in 1805, involving meticulous descriptions of the weather conditions, the terrain, and portraits of all the senior officers. The boys are all deeply impressed by his performance and seemingly encyclopaedic grasp of the event. However, the narrator tells us, Hilary, like any truly creative teacher (or artist, for that matter), is never fully satisfied with his efforts:
Hilary could talk for hours about the second of December 1805, but none the less it was his opinion that he had to cut his accounts far too short, because, as he several times told us, it would take an endless length of time to describe the events of such a day properly, in some inconceivably complex form, recording who had perished, who survived, and exactly where and how, or simply saying what the battlefield was like at nightfall, with the screams and groans of the wounded and dying. In the end all anyone could ever do was sum up the unknown factors in the ridiculous phrase, ‘The fortunes of battle swayed this way and that’, or some similarly feeble and useless cliché. All of us, even when we think we have noted every tiny detail, resort to set pieces which have already been staged often enough by others. We try to reproduce the reality, but the harder we try, the more we find the pictures that make up the stock-in-trade of history forcing themselves upon us: the fallen drummer boy, the infantryman shown in the act of stabbing another, the horse’s eye starting from its socket, the invulnerable Emperor surrounded by his generals, a moment frozen still amidst the turmoil of battle. Our concern with history is a concern with pre-formed images already printed on our brains, images at which we keep staring while the truth lies elsewhere, away from it all, somewhere as yet undiscovered.
3
How We Look at History: A Moment at Liverpool Street Station
The layering of cities intrigues me more and more. The continual erasure of the past. This doesn’t exist in the countryside in the same way. An entire village in Scotland may have been cleared, and the people forcibly removed to the coast or for emigration, but there remain ruined walls, or stones or humps of ground – like gums where teeth used to be – only serving to emphasise the disappearance. Or a farmer rips out a hedge between two fields, but, decades on, you can still see the ridge. You can detect what has gone before. In cities you have to rely on past maps, drawings, photographs. And our minds cannot keep the imprint of buildings in our memory for long, unless the structures were remarkable in some way. When new sites in the city are developed, and the demolition phase takes place, you notice the gap, but within days or weeks it’s impossible to remember the buildings that existed before. Recently, as part of the Crossrail development, an entire block of Soho was suddenly not there any more. Having not been into the centre for a while, I was halted in my tracks by seeing the sky where buildings used to be. I knew that part well; my favourite Italian restaurant was at that end of Dean Street. No more. Gone within days. Yet now I cannot recall a single building or shop (apart from that restaurant) that stood there before. Wiped from memory.
Yet, despite this, there can still be a sometimes dizzying verticality of present and past together in the city. Even when hardly any physical trace of a building or a river remains. Take the River Fleet’s course as an example: from the Vale of Health and Kenwood on Hampstead Heath, the two tributaries joining at Camden, just north of Hawley Road, and then following the curve of St Pancras Way, past Old St Pancras Church (or rather that should be the road following the course of the river), then between the two stations, snaking down one side of King’s Cross Road (you can still see the water and hear it flowing under a grating at St Chad’s Place), then crossing beneath Rosebery Avenue, flowing down Warner Street, the bottom of Herbal Hill, Saffron Hill and finally below Farringdon Road, and out under Blackfriars Bridge. Once you know it’s there you can see it, it becomes part of your London – the great hill of Pentonville suddenly makes sense as one side of a valley, the twisting shape of the roads that cover the still-flowing River Fleet, which one day will emerge again, in all its curving beauty. When the sewers have collapsed, and the asphalt from the roads has been cracked by weeds, long after the last human beings have abandoned this city, the water will be flowing …
Other buried histories of the city remain more elusive, but equally powerful – Liverpool Street station, for example, my first portal into the city as a child, built on the remnants of the Bedlam lunatic asylum, one of the largest in Europe at the time. From old maps I’ve tried to trace the perimeter walls of the ‘Hospital of St Mary of Bethlehem’, as the asylum was officially known; they appear to run along London Wall on one side and Bishopsgate on the other, at almost exactly the spot where today the European Bank of Reconstruction and Development, the Royal Bank of Scotland and Deutsche Bank all have their London headquarters – some of the institutions that triggered the economic carnage of 2008. With this knowledge I often look at the manic flows of commuters today, and trains disgorging their daily offerings to the city, in quite a different way. The pinched faces, people so tightly wound up that the smallest, unintended slight can unleash a battery of aggression and rage. The supposed normality of this disturbs me more and more, just as surely as any visit to a psychiatric hospital would. Except there you might have a greater sympathy for the people. They at least have given up the pretences of the world – of performance, targets, deadlines.
There is so much that we still do not see. There are so many connections that we have not yet begun to make. Although they lie in front of us; we pass them every day on our way to work, on our way home. Only on a rare day does something make us stop. And for some unfathomable reason, on this particular day, we look up and notice what we’ve never seen before. This happened to me at Liverpool Street some time ago, stopping off one day on my way back to Hackney.
I must have walked past hundreds of times over the last twenty-five years or so, on my way home, or heading for the train that takes me down to Manningtree to see my family. That lulling familiarity of views acreted over three decades, so burnt into the memory that each place becomes a held image – the catacombs out of Liverpool Street, that narrowest of bottle openings where fifteen tracks momentarily shrink to half a dozen, often bringing trains to a halt tantalisingly close to their destination; Repton Boys Club, somewhere in the East End; the vast dull-green warehouse overhanging the canal as Bethnal Green turns to Bow; the old Bryant & May factory, standing high over the dual carriageway like some Victorian castle; now the Olympic site rising like a mirage just beyond; and then that strange hinterland of Maryland–Romford–Ilford, cemeteries and breweries; a kind of countryside arrives at Shenfield; Chelmsford – the Marconi factory now deserted; Witham, that oval of cricket pitch that seems impossibly English in the summer, when dotted figures in white are circled there, and others rest in the shade of chestnut trees; the kiosk with its old sign – ‘The Times – get on to a train of thought’; Kelvedon, Mark Tey – the tiny local line that somehow survived Dr Beeching, curving temptingly away towards the Colne Valley and distant recesses of childhood. Smiling, remembering that we really believed it was called ‘Marks Tey’ because that was where our father changed trains to go to work in London; almost home now, the stream with that odd concrete barrier, a tunnel of oaks, and Colchester arrives with what used to be several factory sheds – ‘Woods of Colchester’, now a Dutch-sounding name instead; the last miles between Colchester and Manningtree, a garden nursery, and then – that moment that still can thrill – as the whole valley of the Stour is revealed, the sheep kneeling in the meadows as they graze. The truth of summer. Coming home. The calming of the mind. And all the people that have greeted me here, at Manningtree station, over the years. My father’s bearded face, my mother’s smile and wave, nephews and nieces tumbling towards me gleefully …